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How camping once could give you the best sleep of your life every night

After the camping trip, however, participants’ melatonin levels went down as soon as they woke up, which indicates they had defeated the jet lag.

camping sleep

It’s February, it’s cold, and your bed just gets comfier each time you hit the snooze button. But have you noticed it’s been way harder to get up lately? Here’s one solution: Head outdoors. Sleep researchers say camping could be the secret to more restful sleep, especially during winter. (Just make sure you bundle up.)

The study, published today in Current Biology, set out to investigate the ways modern electrical lighting affects our circadian rhythms. Researchers instructed five active people to spend 6 days in their normal sleeping environment, and then 6 days camping in the Colorado Rocky Mountains without access to anything but natural light: no cell phones, no flashlights, just the moon and the darkness.

Before Thomas Edison screwed up the whole natural light thing for everyone, our levels of melatonin (the hormone that makes you tired) would rise when it got dark to signify bedtime, and they’d fall when the sun came up.

But when the researchers analyzed the participants’ melatonin levels pre-camping trip, they discovered that melatonin stayed at high levels well into the morning, meaning their bodies weren’t ready to wake up yet. After the camping trip, however, participants’ melatonin levels went down as soon as they woke up, which indicates they had defeated the jet lag.

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Participants fell asleep 2.5 hours earlier on average while they were in the woods, which makes sense considering the study cites a 13-fold decrease in exposure to light in the tent as compared to the participants’ daily environments. Wintertime magnifies these effects because the sun turns in earlier, and our bodies expect us to do the same. But the solution is simple: For Monday mornings that suck less, go to bed with the sun the week before.

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